Something short today, as I need to get back on this project, and much of what I can say on this subject I’ve already said in other contexts. Nevertheless, it’s been on my mind lately, and I’ve arrived at a conclusion that may be of some use to others.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly impatient with the game industry’s ongoing “games as art” debate. Until recently, I was fascinated by the topic and would pursue the discussion at every opportunity, but eventually I began to notice a nagging doubt. I couldn’t identify it, but somehow I had the vague sensation that I was wasting my time. Not that the debate is pointless – far from it, in fact – but I began to suspect that I, personally, had no business entering the field to begin with. Then, last week, it hit me:

I don’t have the slightest effin’ clue what “art” is.

Some years ago, a friend of mine came to visit me in New York City, and we decided to spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I adore museums; I love anything that exists for the transmission of knowledge and the broadening of human experience. So we visited our favorite spots: the Temple of Dendur, the Frank Lloyd Wright Room, and others. We then took a turn into the Modern Art wing, and it was there that my inability to understand art was thrown into stark relief.

As I gazed at the exhibit before me, my immediate reaction was a thoroughly innocent one. “Oh,” I thought, “The Museum of Natural History must have opened an annex in the Met, hoping to cross-promote the museums and entice tourists to visit both while they’re in town. Why, I suppose the Met must have put an Edward Hopper or two on display at the Rose Center as well!” But as I stood and absorbed the scene, watching other museum patrons scratching their chins and nodding thoughtfully, I realized to my horror that what I had thought to be an intriguing scientific specimen was, in actuality, meant to be a work of art.

I stared, dumbfounded, at Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Basically a shark in a box. As an object of study, it would have been elegant and fascinating. But its purpose was higher, whether I was able to understand it or not. This was art. My left eye twitched involuntarily. For the next five minutes, the only sound that escaped my lips was a barely audible “huh?” to everyone and no one in particular.

I’ve always been a scientist at heart. As a child, I only ever believed in purposes and results. I did not draw pictures, I drew schematics. I played with Legos. I wanted to build things, go places, explore every last inch of the cosmos. I worshipped science – and still do – because I knew that it would one day allow me to do the impossible. Broadly, I am more than capable of thinking abstractly, but my real interest is in the practical application of abstract concepts. It’s easy to make an general statement like “reason is the highest absolute,” but I care only about how that statement should dictate one’s behavior. I can’t work with the abstract in a vacuum; without some form of practical expression, it has no meaning for me. It may as well be another language.

Artists like Damien Hirst live in exactly this sort of vacuum. Philosophically, that world is impenetrable to me. I am unable to deal with concepts purely as such, without trying to imagine their consequences in physical reality. I get figurative art. I get Quent Cordair. I get Bryan Larsen. I understand craft, talent, vision and execution. I do not get conceptual art. I do not understand Jackson Pollock or Michael Craig-Martin. I lack the ability to understand it. It looks and sounds like gibberish to me. I don’t have that little decoder ring that everyone else seems to possess; that unfathomable capacity to look at something that seemingly represents nothing and get a one out of an apparent zero. My mind is too concrete for that stuff.

This is longer than I expected, but so is everything I say.

Back to games: I’ve come to realize that the “games as art” debate is best left to those who understand art. If you know what art is, more power to you. I will leave the discussion in your capable hands. I have chosen instead to concern myself with the more concrete, but no less significant, issue of games as stories. Rather, I care about stories, period; I have no intention of confining myself strictly to one medium, as some of my ideas are better suited to strict authorial control and would make for dishonest and rigid games. But stories are important. They communicate ideas by way of people, through their words and actions. Characters represent ideas, and if those ideas can manifest themselves in fictional people, so too can they manifest in real people. A heroic character can inspire heroism in the reader. A thoughtful character can provoke thought. A writer can express his values by showing imaginary people living by those values and illustrating the result, and the reader can see this chain of events and choose to contemplate those values in regard to his own life. Storytelling is about creating an intermediate context where one’s ideas can be communicated to someone else who does not share the writer’s perspective.

Stories are my alternative to art. And as videogames continue struggling to find their place in the cultural pantheon, I know that I will be in the minority. Designers far more experienced than I am will continue to discuss the artistic merits of games, and I will happily stand aside and tell my stories in the hope that at least a few others will find something valuable in them. I actually prefer it that way. I’d rather not have too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say.

~ by George on August 2, 2009.